Sonnet 5 Drops, Fable 5 Will Return & Fusion's First Plant Gets Licensed w/ Philip Johnston | #268

Summary

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis – Episode #268

"Sonnet 5 Drops, Fable 5 Will Return & Fusion's First Plant Gets Licensed w/ Philip Johnston"
Release Date: July 1, 2026

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Overview

In this wide-ranging episode, Peter Diamandis and his panel of experts dive deep into the future of technology and its impact on humanity. The episode oscillates between key stories in robotics, energy, AI, law enforcement tech, and the rapidly growing realm of space-based infrastructure. Notably, the team welcomes Philip Johnson, CEO of StarCloud, for an in-depth discussion on space-based data centers. Throughout, the panel aims to provide optimistic, forward-looking insights while acknowledging policy, investment, and societal challenges.

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Main Themes & Purpose

• Tracking acceleration and convergence in robotics, AI, energy (especially fusion), and space infrastructure.
• Examining how exponential technology growth continues to outpace expert predictions.
• Exploring the geopolitical and regulatory implications of frontier tech.
• Spotlighting entrepreneurial and investment opportunities at the edges of what’s possible.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. Exponential Tech Growth vs. Linear Expert Predictions

Timestamps: 03:14–07:48

• Peter Diamandis highlights how "experts consistently underestimate exponential growth," pointing to solar, EV, and battery adoption as case studies.
• Salim Ismail: “Experts are really good at measuring the actual technology. They're terrible at the compounding ecosystem around it...every two years for 60 years an article says ‘Moore’s Law is over.’ It never is.” (05:03)
• Alex: "You should always take the logarithm of the actual history before you hand it to experts..." (06:03)
• Takeaway: Prediction errors are baked into established paradigms; the panel warns against linear thinking.

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2. The Robotics Explosion: The Next Investment Frontier

Timestamps: 07:48–19:02

• Industrial → Domestic → Ubiquitous robots: Current surge in humanoid robot companies (140 in China alone), with Morgan Stanley’s forecasts ballooning from 14,000 to 500,000 robots by 2030.
• Alex: “Superintelligence is set to spill out of the data centers into the streets...the obvious vehicle for that is autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots.” (07:48)
• Dave Blunden: “Gutter cleaning alone is a $1B business...robots for that and for window washing is a $20B global market.” (09:58)
• Peter Diamandis notes affordability, referencing Unitree’s R1 at $4,900: “This is the price of a cheap used car...” (13:37)
• Salim Ismail: Predicts it will take a decade to automate “dull, dirty, dangerous” tasks before domestic robots are pervasive. (18:45)
• Key Insight: As robot hardware commoditizes, VALUE will migrate to the SOFTWARE stack—think iPhone apps for robots.

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3. Robots in Law Enforcement & Public Perception

Timestamps: 20:55–32:38

• Drones as First Responders: Orlando PD’s use of Skydio drones; move away from Chinese drones due to security.
• Peter Diamandis: “...a drone will get [to a live location] almost immediately—it’s going to save lives...as long as you have good policy and governance...” (23:08)
• Alex: “We could have drones as densely distributed as fire hydrants...” (24:45)
• Drones with active tools: Case in Sacramento where a drone used a magnet to disarm a suspect; tasedrops discussed.
• Alex: “This was all foretold by Minority Report...I have to imagine that swarms of drones are absolutely in our near future.” (28:06)
• Salim Ismail counters with story of Dutch police training hawks to hunt drones, illustrating tech-animal arms race. (29:41)
• Societal tradeoff: Abundant aerial surveillance = less crime, but also poses privacy and innovation risks.

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4. Energy: Europe’s Nuclear Pivot & Fusion’s Arrival

Timestamps: 33:31–49:43

Fission:

• Switzerland reverses nuclear ban, paralleling France’s mass reactor success.
• Alex: “Europe is going to need to radically increase power consumption...nuclear fission is a very attractive way to do that.” (35:03)

Fusion:

• Regulatory milestone: Helion (Sam Altman-backed) gets green light for the first commercial fusion plant (Orion) to supply Microsoft by 2028.
• Peter Diamandis: “It looks like fusion is finally here.” (27:00, 39:01)
• Salim Ismail: “Once you have clean, cheap, and dense energy, cost of computation, desalination, manufacturing—all drop dramatically.” (41:31)
• Alex: Draws parallels between the slow, steady progress in fusion and AI’s recursive improvement cycles. (39:01)
• Dave Blunden: On the transformative potential: “If you have cheap, virtually free fusion energy...anything is good.” (44:13)
• Notable design: Helion’s approach of direct magnetic-to-electric conversion, skipping the standard turbine/water stage.

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5. AI Race: Anthropic, Grok/X.AI, and Geopolitics

Timestamps: 49:43–73:37

• Fable 5 (Anthropic): Model offline for 15 days due to U.S. government intervention; symbolic of AI akin to “controlled munitions.”
  • Stripe used Fable 5 to overhaul 50 million lines of code in a single day. (63:59)
  • Alex: “Historians will look back and say this period in time marked the endgame of recursive self-improvement...” (64:58)
• Sonnet 5: Released as a stopgap, but called “mediocre at a high price” by Dave Blunden. (69:09, 70:34)
• Regulatory risk now central for investors and operators—build model-agnostic architectures.
• Grok 4.5 (Elon Musk’s X.AI): Elon’s brute force approach—promises new foundation models monthly, leveraging SpaceX compute.
  • Alex: “Hopefully...this brute force compute approach can bring Grok to the frontier.” (59:00)
  • Salim Ismail: Believes Cursor acquisition offers a flywheel for better human-machine workflow models. (62:04)
• Takeaway: AI's “supply constraints” are shifting power to infrastructure providers—the new platform wars are here.

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6. Computational Archaeology: New Eyes on Ancient Texts

Timestamps: 50:14–56:44

• Vesuvius Challenge: AI unlocks texts burnt by Vesuvius in 79 AD. (Nat Friedman/Daniel Gross, $1.8M prize)
• Alex: “The killer app of the singularity is superpowering computational archaeology...imagine scanning the entire Earth for historical clues and reconstructing history.” (51:28)
• Dave Blunden: Highlights new forms of AI (not transformer LLMs) are critical for such tasks—network architectures oriented to reconstruction, not just language. (54:14)
• The prize model (XPRIZE style) brings leverage: "a $1.8M prize brings $10s of millions of genius to the problem." —Peter (55:40)

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7. Space: Data Centers, Vertical Integration, and Dyson Swarms

Timestamps: 75:56–109:34

Interview: Philip Johnson, CEO, StarCloud

• StarCloud: Building space-based data centers. Launched first GPU in orbit (H100). Next launches include 100x power, AWS outposts, and (eventually) 10MW per Starship launch.
• Philip: “We trained our first LLM in space...played Doom on the satellite as one does.” (76:20, 77:31)
• Panel discusses business model: StarCloud is an energy/infrastructure provider (think Equinix for space).
• Alex: “We can't have a solar system-scale monopoly...I want to see multiple Dyson swarms.” (78:04)
• Philip’s vision: In 10 years, most new compute will be in space; in 50 years, >99% in orbit—a prime example of digital abundance.
  • “If you ask me if SpaceX has a monopoly in launch in five years, the answer is yes. In 10, it’s no.” (92:53)
• Bottlenecks: Launch constraints (all Falcon 9 slots for 2028 are filled), need for new vertically-integrated heavy launch providers. Cooling and radiation also key challenges; StarCloud's ultra-light radiators are a milestone.

Telecom Disruption: SpaceX Starlink, Direct-to-Phone

Timestamps: 93:31–97:46

• SpaceX plans direct-to-phone satellite service; rumors swirl about a potential acquisition of T-Mobile.
• Philip: “I can't see a world where, on Starlink revenues alone, Space X isn’t the most valuable company in the world.” (95:21)
• Telcos face increasing disruption from vertically integrated space players.

Spectrum, Lasers, and the Future of Space Comms

Timestamps: 107:06–109:17

• Rocket Lab acquires Iridium to own spectrum—vertical integration as the dominant model (“SpaceX playbook”).
• Philip: “Lasers are the future for space comms...RF is getting less relevant for high-bandwidth, global-scale purposes.” (108:31)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Experts are really good at measuring technology. They're terrible at the compounding ecosystem around it.” —Salim Ismail (05:03)
• “Physical labor too cheap to meter...we can do for the physical world what AI is doing to knowledge work.” —Alex (15:07)
• “When energy becomes abundant, all sorts of other dominoes fall.” —Salim Ismail (41:31)
• “It looks like fusion is finally here.” —Peter Diamandis (27:00, 39:01)
• “Historians will look back and say this period in time marked the endgame of recursive self-improvement.” —Alex (64:58)
• “If you told me I’d be listening to a chipmunk voice explain Faraday’s Law...” —Dave Blunden, on Helion’s launch video (49:44)
• “I want there to be multiple Dyson swarms. We can't have a solar system-scaled monopoly.” —Alex (78:04)
• “If you, if you ask me...most new compute capacity in 10 years will be in space. In 20 years, maybe half; in 50 years, almost all.” —Philip Johnson (90:48–92:00)
• “I can't see a world where, on Starlink revenues alone, Space X isn’t the most valuable company in the world.” —Philip Johnson (95:21)

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Important Timestamps

• 03:14 – Underestimating exponential curves across sectors
• 07:48 – Robotic adoption data and investment thesis
• 15:07 – The real disruption when robots assemble robots
• 20:55 – Drones as first responders in U.S. law enforcement
• 33:31 – Europe’s course correction on nuclear/fusion
• 39:01 – Helion's fusion plant breakthrough
• 49:43 – AI models as controlled munitions; regulatory risk
• 63:59 – Fable 5 government intervention and Stripe’s usage
• 75:56 – StarCloud’s LLMs in space and the shape of orbital compute
• 93:31 – SpaceX’s direct-to-phone plans and telecom disruption
• 107:06 – Rocket Lab acquires Iridium – spectrum as a prize

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Tone & Language

Casual, optimistic, slightly irreverent. The hosts often joke ("playing Doom on a satellite—as one does"), rib each other, but always circle back to big ideas and practical takeaways for founders, investors, and technophiles.

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Summary Takeaways

• Infrastructure is destiny: Whoever owns compute, energy, launch, and spectrum, will shape the exponential future.
• Abundance is approaching, but bottlenecks (regulatory, supply, launch, bandwidth, etc.) will define who benefits and how fast.
• Society must navigate profound tensions between abundance, privacy, and control—for both individuals and nations.
• Entrepreneurs have never had more leverage, especially as commoditized hardware opens new software/application layers (robotics, AI, space).

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For anyone interested in the bleeding edge of technology, markets, and the human future, this episode is essential listening—a bracing shot of optimism grounded by hard questions and real technical depth.

Transcript

[Dave Blunden]

It's pretty clear that Sonnet 5 now is a way to kind of fill this gap until Fable 5 is back out. A kind of mediocre capability at a high price point, but people will still need to buy it.

[Peter Diamandis]

Anthropic's flagship model, Fable 5 has been offline for 15 days because the US government pulled it. Now Axios reports it may be back within days.

[Alex]

Historians will look back and say this period in time marked the period towards the middle or the end game. I recursive self improvement.

[Peter Diamandis]

Helion cleared the required Washington State regulatory approvals for its Orion fusion power plant. It looks like fusion is finally here.

[Alex]

If you were watching the right metric or the right figure of merit over the long term, you could predict when this is going to happen. And it's imminent.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right, mates, let's jump into data centers and space and for that we're pleased to bring a friend on.

[Philip Johnson]

Thanks so much for having me. It's a huge honor. I've been a long time fan.

[Peter Diamandis]

Now that's a moonshot.

[Dave Blunden]

Ladies and gentlemen,

[Peter Diamandis]

welcome back to Moonshots, everyone. Your front row seat to the coming singularity in the age of abundance. I'm here with my magnificent moonshot mates. Dave Blunden, our managing partner of Link Exponential ventures, the number one funder of MIT and Harvard AI startups. Salim Ismail, our global trotter, our CEO of OpenExo and of course AWG, our in house ASI. I'm Peter Diamandis, your host and your abundance evangelist. Gentlemen, good afternoon, good morning, good evening, wherever you are. So you know, where is Waldo today? Salim, where on the planet are you and where have you been?

[Salim Ismail]

We dropped our son off at a camp in San Sebastian in Spain or near there. And I'm in Biarritz right now for a few days.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay, and you were like in Germany before that?

[Salim Ismail]

I mean, I've been in five countries in the last three days. It's. It's really been nuts.

[Peter Diamandis]

Of course, of course. And Alex, all well with you?

[Alex]

Yeah, I'm GDP maxing or doing my best. Always be GDP maxing.

[Peter Diamandis]

I'm happiness maxing, you know, gratitude maxing. And Dave, good to see you, pal.

[Dave Blunden]

Hey, I'm at Lingq Studio and just for word for the wise, we have a ton of Northeastern and Princeton activity in addition to MIT and Harvard these days. That's true.

[Peter Diamandis]

Of course.

[Dave Blunden]

Tech Trek is killing it out in San Francisco. Liputan Andrew Feldman, the number two guy at Nvidia, they were all there on Friday talking to the troops. So it's it's really rolling.

[Peter Diamandis]

Amazing.

[Dave Blunden]

This is the thing we did with Eric Schmidt and Eric Brynjolfsson and Daniel Larroos.

[Peter Diamandis]

So today we're going to cover a bunch of news stories. We're going to catch up on robotics energy data Centers. We've got 20 stories across six fronts. A lot's happening and a lot of capital is flowing. For those of you joining us, for the first time, our mission here at Moonshots, keep you informed, keep you on optimistic about the future that we're creating. All right, let's jump in. I have three stories I want to hit on the abundance front.

[Salim Ismail]

Wait, wait. I just got to make a quick point to everybody watching. If you've not seen the last episode with IMOD, I'm about 3/4 of the way because it's on them. We are trying to keep up with our own episodes. When I miss one and it was ridiculously amazing. So just a comment there.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, and Imod's made some great releases in the last 48 hours on his latest model combinations. All right, so I'm going to open our first story on robotics. But before we do, because I want to talk about the predictions of how many robots we're going to have on planet Earth. I was having a conversation with a dear friend, Ramez Nam today. Ramez is one of the earliest singular university faculty members and futurists. He's extraordinary. And he shared this chart with me, guys, that I'd love to discuss. It's a look at how experts consistently underestimate exponential growth growth. So in this chart on the left here, we see new solar growth in solar. And that, that yellow exponential line is the actual growth in solar. It's been growing at an extraordinary rate. And what we see on these departures that go horizontal are the predictions that the experts make every year showing, you know, linear or, you know, just small incremental amount of growth. And over and over again they underestimate it. The chart in the center there is the Experts predictions on EV growth. And again we see exponential growth in EVs and then the forecasts consistently are underestimating the actual growth. And then finally we see the same chart going on in, in battery sales. So it's an interesting phenomenon that while we're living in this exponential growth, the experts who are the experts in the way things used to be are not projecting the growth. They're staying very, you know, shall we say, sublinear in their estimates. So Saleem, you and I have seen this before and we've discussed this any Thoughts?

[Salim Ismail]

Oh my God. Every presentation I ever give has a segment with several slides showing this, right? The poster child is a story about Moore's law ending by 2022, which came out in 2013, some experts said, and you can go back and look at technology press, and every two years that article is appearing for 60 years. Right? Because experts are really good at measuring the technology. They're terrible at the compounding ecosystem around it. There's some really dramatic examples from Romes around the energy ones where the solar is vertical and every expert for 10 years goes horizontal in that thing. It's an endemic problem. We have that whole headline in the original book, Peter, which we put together saying, beware the experts. Right? And this is the immune system. Because when you've got somebody that's got 30 years of experience in something, they'll tell you how not to do something.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, agreed. Alex, any thoughts on this particular note?

[Alex]

I think the moral of the story is you should always take the logarithm of the actual history before you hand it to experts for their linear extrapolation so you can get the right answer out.

[Peter Diamandis]

You know, I define an expert as someone. I define an expert as someone who can tell you exactly how it can't happen, right? And it's so true that experts today are sort of so ingrained in the past because if there's a disruption, if there's a revolution that comes, they're no longer the expert. And so it's just, it's against their best interests. So I want to tie this story to our first robotics story here. And it comes with two predictions. The first was Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley had originally predicted 14,000 Chinese robots coming out of China and they've upped it to 26. Now they've just upped it to 50,000 and projecting 500,000 robots by 2030. But the fact of the matter is there's 140 humanoid robot companies developing hardware in China today. And at the same time, you've got Elon projecting, you know, tens of millions of robots to 50 million robots by 20 by 2030, and billions going into the early 2000-30s. On the flip side, what we're seeing here is on the right hand side of this is a chart from Andreessen Horowitz that shows we're going to be seeing about $16 billion of hardware investments in Q1 of 2026. And the US is finally catching up. Alex, I know that you're heavily committed to this and Dave, your thesis is we're moving from an AI centric entrepreneurial ecosystem to a hardware centric ecosystem. Would love your thoughts on this. Alex, you first.

[Alex]

Yeah. As I've mentioned on the pod in the past, I think superintelligence is set to spill out of the data centers into the streets. And I think the most obvious vehicle for that is autonomous vehicles on the one hand and humanoid and near humanoid robots on the other. I think as we start to increase the number of humanoid or just say general purpose robots per capita, there are going to be certain regimes. At the low number of humanoid robots per capita regime, it looks like robots performing industrial applications, robots in factories, robots doing logistics. At the. As we start to get, I think closer to approximately one humanoid robot per capita, it looks like domestic robots everywhere. It looks like an iRobot style regime where everyone has domestic staff. As we start, interestingly, and a point that I don't think I hear frequently enough, as we start to push well through the approximately one humanoid robot per capita regime to 10 or 100 humanoid robots per capita at that point, I think to a hobby horse, I think of Celine, we start to end up in some pretty exotic futures where there is no longer necessarily a justification for the humanoid form. We end up with micro robots and nanorobots and there's sort of a natural sense in which the humanoid form is no longer natural in a world where we have a thousand general purpose robots per capita and we can start solving all of the grand physical world challenges that would maybe be uneconomical if we only had one humanoid robot per capita. So I think we're going to very rapidly scale through the low per capita regime to the approximately one per capita regime to the many per capita regime. It's going to be a very exciting scale.

[Peter Diamandis]

So David, take a second and walk me through your thesis right now because we've been investing together in AI companies mostly and you've said that you expect that is going to sort of fall off and more of an investment to hardware in the next couple of years. Why?

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah, I think we have to think in terms of 10 year investment themes. And you know, 10 years in the age of AI is like 100 years in any normal world. And so I do think the next one in two years is still dominated by white collar automation, AI algorithms, chip design that designs chips, the beginnings of data centers in space. But then if you think beyond two years in the future, what are the investments that are going to really be big? 3, 4, 5, 8, 10 years from now, the automation of construction of data centers is all going to be robotic biotech chemical mixing experiments, reading gels, that's all going to be robotic. And so the machines that do that, you take a guess. How big do you think the US gutter cleaning industry is? People who go on your roof and. And pick the leaves out of your gutter. How much do you know per year? I do. I looked it up. How big that that use case alone is $1 billion a year. If you built a robot that cleaned gutters and washed windows, those two tasks, that's a $20 billion global market. $20 billion global market. So that's a theme that will support this slide. Says 140 humanoid robotics companies.

[Peter Diamandis]

There's in China. In China.

[Dave Blunden]

In China, yeah. There's room for thousands and tens of thousands of robotics companies specialized for various use cases. Everything from wafer movement inside a chip fab to chemical mixing and biotech to gutter cleaning to just everything, you know, construction. Construction has thousands of individual tasks. So it's a very broad long term investment theme. Kitchen work too. We're already starting to invest in that one. But kitchen work automation. Because the fast food restaurants can buy at scale and so they'll co develop with you.

[Peter Diamandis]

This is where Travis Klatnick is focused with his company Adams just fully roboticized kitchens. You know what's interesting is this particular note of the 16.5 billion in last quarter was in 500 deals. I used to think that. I'm a huge Star Trek fan. I used to think that Star wars was kind of silly with all those hundreds of variations of droids out there. But it looks like it's coming.

[Alex]

Peter, it's such an interesting point. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this. Historically, the robots have been missing from Star Trek other than in the first few series, like sung type data robots. There were no robots. Maybe it was. What are your thoughts on that?

[Peter Diamandis]

I think they wanted to create a very humanistic series and Gene Roddenberry was all about the societal implications of technology in this future. And even computer. Even Computer was the name of the computer which was Gene Roddenberry's wife Christine. Playing that role was El Cars.

[Alex]

Right.

[Peter Diamandis]

Was very, you know, roboticized. It didn't predict this. You know, incredible empathic voices we have on our models today. Yeah, they miss that. Well, you know, we're going to have. Rod Roddenberry is going to be with us at the Moonshot Summit. He's going to be on stage, one of the judges of our future Vision X Prize. So we'll sit down and ask him. I think those are those are important questions to ask. Why did they miss that part of the future?

[Alex]

Is it just like low production because they added them in more recent Star Trek series? Yeah, they retconned them, but.

[Peter Diamandis]

But still nothing close to Star Wars. And you know, I think a lot

[Salim Ismail]

of it had to do with the theme, right? Infinite diversity, infinite creativity. And they were focused very much on human interaction. All the aliens that were humanoid, not just because you could put actors in those suits, but the fact that you were always dealing with the interpersonal elements in those, in the plot lines of those.

[Peter Diamandis]

So yeah, we've got lots of companies that are building robots now. Famously in the US We've got obviously Tesla with Optimus, we have figure we have one X. And in China, probably the robot company that's got the most publicity has been unitree. We had one of the founders of Unitree on stage with us at the Abundance Summit. I want to play their latest video. It's got 11 million views. And this is a glance at the R1, which is incredibly selling for 4900 bucks. I mean, this is the price of a cheap used car, which is saying a lot. So let's take a look at the R1. So I mean, it's crazy, You know, my point is it's an extremely capable robot, but the work here is going to be on the software layers, right? You buy this robot. I don't think it does that out of the box, but I think you could probably buy the algorithms that enable you to do that. But I see an explosion in the number of people experimenting with these robots. At 5,000 bucks, that's affordable by, you know, almost anybody who has a reasonable income. Alex, where does this go for you?

[Alex]

Well, I think the elephant in this particular room, as with Elon, demonstrating to the world that you could drive the cost of heavy lift to LEO down to effectively near zero through reusable, propulsively landing rockets. The elephant in the room here, I think is humanoid robots that are able to assemble other humanoid robots. If you take the the cost of assembly down to near zero, what we're left is the cost of raw materials and the cost of energy. And that's going to be effectively de minimis. So I think as we drive, and by we in this case, I really mean Chinese organizations, because the west is woefully behind at the moment as we as humanity start to drive the unit cost of general purpose robotic embodiments down to near zero. At some point the we will need to cross the threshold of robots being able to assemble Other robots in order to keep driving that cost down. And then at that point we have physical labor too cheap to meter. And as I pointed out in past approximately two thirds of the service economy constitutes some sort of physical labor. And we can do for the physical world what AI agents are right now in the process of doing to knowledge work, which is basically driving the cost of knowledge work and soon physical work down to near zero.

[Dave Blunden]

Can I make a point actually that we learned at the Gigafactory that I completely think is. It was lost on me and I think it's critically important is when Elon says humanoid robots, building humanoid robots, it's actually the CNC milling machine or the auto lathe already exists. It's already making the parts. It's just a file loaded in. What those were designed for is a human to go and take the part out of the machine and put it in the next machine. And so the humanoid robot does not need to literally create with a file and a piece of metal. The automation's already there. It just needs to do the part that the human is doing today, which is moving the part from machine to machine and doing the final assembly. So it's a much easier problem than robots making robots, sounds like.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, I think the point I want to make here is we're heading towards commodity pricing on these things. 4900 bucks. Right. And so as we move to commodity pricing, the question is, where's the value layer?

[Salim Ismail]

Well, the value layer clearly will be in the software and the apps.

[Peter Diamandis]

Exactly the point I want to make.

[Salim Ismail]

Yeah, I think that's a really important point. And people are going to build apps. Look, if you go back to the original personal computers, you put them out there and people kind of like, we didn't know what they would do with them. And then over time, you had more and more applications built. Now these things show up networked, out of the box. There'll be profound new skills being emerging all the time from these things. I think it's going to take. I'm still going to say I think it's going to take a lot longer than people think because the driving it took us 20 years. And that's a very bounded domain space. Humanoid robots doing gardening, etc. There's a million edge cases and I

[Peter Diamandis]

think we'll explore there. What's different here is that, you know, and this is sort of what does it mean for the entrepreneur out there, you can buy this and begin to build on top of it.

[Salim Ismail]

Agree.

[Peter Diamandis]

This is not something that requires permission from anybody. It's not something that requires a massive corporate budget. An entrepreneur can buy this for 1400 bucks. It's like the Raspberry PI moment and you can start hacking and publishing software to these robots. That becomes a new revenue engine. So I think that's what's most interesting for me is the explosion of applications that come on top of the iPhone that now come on top of these robots.

[Salim Ismail]

I agree, But I still think we're going to spend a lot more time figuring out the industrial use cases and the dull, dirty, dangerous jobs and getting those automated automated. There's so much scope, it's going to take a decade to kind of get through that before you even get to somebody coming over and doing gardening for you.

[Alex]

We talked in a past pod about Royal we I mentioned the idea that the export controls that we're seeing at the moment imposed on frontier models are in some sense you could look at them through the lens of immigration policy as being regulations on importing foreign or exporting, depending on your perspective superintelligence. But that's the software layer. I do think so. Admittedly, maybe a spicier take here. I think that as the cost of robotic embodiments, primarily from China at the moment, starts to come down, I would not be surprised to see similar either import controls or other national security motivated restrictions start to kick in. It's not just about dumping, it's also about taking the embodiments for superintelligence and moving them across borders.

[Dr. Dawn Musailam]

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[Peter Diamandis]

Well, you've heard the Trump administration saying they want to invest in the robotics industry. We've seen, you know obviously Tesla and Brett Adcock from figure getting massive investments to support the growth of these systems. It becomes strategic for The US and we're going to find out in our next story. Let me just, let me just go there for a second where we're going to start to see robots being used in a number of different areas, including law enforcement. So a drone, of course, is a robot. And I'm going to share a particular video here that Alex, you shared with me. This is out of Orlando and this is the US Law enforcement beginning to use drones as first responders. Let's take a listen to this video.

[Dr. Dawn Musailam]

And new at noon, the Orlando Police Department is now using drones as first responders, sending them to some 911 calls to give officers a live look at the scene.

[Alex]

A new eye in the sky.

[Dr. Dawn Musailam]

Now responding to some of Orlando's most serious calls. Orlando Police Chief Eric Smith, addressing a big question from the community.

[Peter Diamandis]

What would you say to the citizens

[Alex]

who either seeing this as an invasion

[Dr. Dawn Musailam]

of privacy or an overstepped, we're not

[Peter Diamandis]

looking in people's windows. We're not spying on people. We're not just flying around, just fly around.

[Dr. Dawn Musailam]

Qualifying call comes in, a nearby drone can be dispatched to specific GPS coordinates. Then from the crime center, an FAA certified pilot can control the drone, giving officers a live view of the scene, including if a suspect runs, hides, or

[Alex]

possibly has a weapon.

[Peter Diamandis]

So interestingly enough, this was demonstrated on June 17th as a first deployment and had what they call nine docks at different locations and 11 Skydio network drones. Skydio is sort of the US manufacturer today. It, you know, used to be DJI out of China, but we put, you know, import controls on DJI for a number of security reasons. And so skydio, even though it's more expensive, it's something like three to ten times more expensive than the DJI drones are getting it. Interestingly enough, Salim Rick Smith, who's one of my abundance members, he's the CEO of Axon, it's the company that makes the taser and the body cams, has the contract here and they're coordinating all this. They did a trial with a single drone and it beat patrol officers about a third of the time to get to the live location and provided useful information in 97% of the time they claim. But you can imagine that we're going to have drones on buildings throughout the city and a drone will get there almost immediately. You know, I can imagine there's fear that people have on this subject, but I think being able to get to emergency locations, making sure you can assess situation when you need to have medical personnel there, it's going to save lives and I want to acknowledge the fear that people have, but I think on the whole, as long as you have good policy and good governance about how the data is retained or used, who gets access, I think this is an important step for law enforcement.

[Salim Ismail]

It's huge. And you know, we did our very second Sprint back in 2015 with InterProteccion, which is the largest insurance company in Mexico, 30 million users, and they actually deployed drones because they were so much faster than ambulances getting to an accident scene. And they would scan and map the whole area so that you people as before, people move the cars and everything like that. So they had full information before anything happened. It was kind of an amazing experience. So we've seen this trend over a long period of time. I think we can expect to see this accelerate pretty radically just because of the practicality of it.

[Alex]

If I might add, there are regimes as the cost of robotic embodiment trends towards near zero becomes too cheap to meter, that we in the west are unaccustomed to, but that China, for a variety of reasons, including demographics, has seen for a number of years. For example, this is well publicized. The Chinese Communist Party maintains members, officers on a per block basis. Certainly this was the case during the pandemic in China. The west doesn't really have any concept of this. If you look at how first responders are geographically distributed in the U.S. it's on a per municipality basis or precincts. There's no notion of say one or more officers per block that are just permanently stationed on a single block. But with drones, this becomes possible. We could have literally drones as densely distributed geographically as fire hydrants are. And you could literally just, if there's a problem in a block or at part of a block, just remotely activate the drone and then you have an instant point of presence.

[Peter Diamandis]

Let me share. The second story comes out of Sacramento. There was a suspect who had a knife and they deployed a drone with a, with a magnet to grab the knife and make the scene safe for the police to enter. Let's take a look at this. So here we see the drone going. The guy is holding a knife. A magnet or electromagnet is attached to the knife and it pulls it out of the guy's hand as he's apparently sleeping. So this is interesting. This is a drone that's disarming somebody. If you guys remember, during the Abundance Summit, Rick Smith again with Axon, showed us his taser equipped drone. And I went on stage wearing a suit to protect me and he tased me from his drone. So I think this is coming, this use of drones in law enforcement for both observing and for trying to de escalate a situation. The drone market right now is about $100 billion around the world. It's going to be increasing. We're seeing drones being used obviously in the Ukraine, very famously. Eric Schmidt's been funding a drone company to help the Ukrainians in their fight for independence. Dave, any thoughts from you?

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah, you know, Scientific American did a great research study on why crime rates are down by half in the US and they keep coming down. And it was entirely connected to deployment of first responders in the right place at the right time, largely driven by gps. But now with the drone footage, you can get much more accurate. You know, the first responders want to be there and they want to help, but getting the right people to the right place at the right time. But I'm a huge believer that the video footage is going to be massively impactful and the resolution just keeps going up and up and up and up. You know, the physical side of it, where you're disarming somebody is that's a little ways out. You know, that was kind of a, like,

[Peter Diamandis]

niche case.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah, very niche case. But the video side is like, right here, right now. And as Alex was saying, you could easily cheaply have as abundant a fleet as there are fire hydrants. That would cost next to nothing. Yeah, so that's. That's imminent.

[Alex]

I'll also point out, if I may, this was all foretold by Minority Report. You remember the scene in Minority Report with the police officers deploying spiders to search an apartment complex for Tom Cruise's character? We're starting to catch up with that now. And yeah, right now it starts with a couple of police precincts in the US that they're using drones for first response. My understanding is far more frequently in China right now than the US or the west in general are. But project forward a few years when there are a variety of new form factors, Maybe we get spiders, maybe we get drones. I have to imagine the drone, the flying form factor is a good deal more versatile for interacting with hostile scenarios. These are going to get smaller and cheaper and more plentiful. We haven't even seen what happens in the west from a first response perspective when police can deploy swarms of drones rather than just individual drones. But as cost goes down, we will absolutely see swarms.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, I mean, again, I think the public is going to have a bit of a fearful reaction to this. It really depends what the drones are armed with. It depends, you know, what the drones, the guidelines on the use of drones are, and we need to address that. I mean, getting, getting medical equipment to a site of an accident rapidly. You know, we're going to see EVTOLs, flying cars, delivering ambulance personnel there. But getting a defibrillator, for example, to a location that's jammed by traffic. Drones are going to play an important part of this, and they're getting better and better. Salim, you're going to say, I just

[Salim Ismail]

remember the counterpoint here. There was a fellow from the Dutch police force at one of our Singularity executive programs, and they were combating the fact that drug dealers were using drones. So they trained a bunch of hawks to drop mesh wires onto the drones, to wrap them, entangle them. It was like, so retro to be training up birds to be attacking drones. It was totally surreal.

[Dave Blunden]

That's actually a real problem. Below a certain size, there are a lot of birds that go after these things. So the really small ones actually have a little bit of a problem.

[Salim Ismail]

In the Ukraine, they're having. They're having a huge problem because they've got strands of optical fiber from all of the drones that have attacked them lying everywhere. Oh, yeah, it's a massive issue.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, the number one use of drones I'm excited about came from the Wildfire X Prize I talked about in the last pod, you know, where drones are able to get to a fire at inception, put it out rapidly before it causes hundreds of millions or billions in damage and causes the loss of significant life. So.

[Alex]

And we didn't, we didn't get our flying cars in the end. I mean, we have, we have flying car companies, but they're relatively sparse. But I do think we're going to have skies over the next few years that are utterly filled, that are densely filled, I should say, with these drones.

[Dave Blunden]

Well, the drone ambulance is the coolest thing ever, because it's. No one's going to stand in the way of a drone ambulance. Right. It's there to save somebody's life. But that'll unlock all the technology, all of the airspace, all of the regulatory barriers, and also prove the efficacy. So that's going to be a great, really cool stepping stone. I can't wait for the.

[Peter Diamandis]

One of the substacks I put out was about the fact that we're heading towards a point where you can know anything you want, anytime you want, anywhere you want. We've got orbital satellites, we have the 200 satellites from Will Marshall at Planet, and then we're going to have an aviation layer from the flying cars and these drones imaging everything at centimeter in sub centimeter resolution, and then all the autonomous cars, you know, gathering terabytes of data on the road. So everything is going to be imaged very soon. And, you know, the spooky side of that, obviously, is loss of privacy, if you believe you have privacy. The positive side is that, you know, there's no crime. I put out a part of that blog saying when people are observed, they act better. You know, I got a lot of negative feedback on that. But I think the fact I can imagine is true. I think when there's someone. When a despot has a CNN camera pointing at them, they do less. They behave differently in the global stage. One of the foundations I used to support was the Lindbergh foundation that would fly drones over herds of elephants, and the poachers would stay away when the drones were flying over them.

[Dave Blunden]

Well, you want to hear a funny story from China? Sean, my son, who just got back from China, was talking to a guy who was mansplaining the entrepreneurship vibe in China and how to build a great company. And Sean said, well, it's all about the team, right? This is what we preach at Link Ventures. You get great people, they succeed every time. He said, no, no, no. It has nothing to do with the team. Like, well, then is it the business plan? He said, no, no, no. It's what the government needs next. That's the only thing that matters. Wow. They're like, wow, is that discouraging? So I think with the loss of freedom and privacy also comes the loss of innovation. So I would think that. I don't think the drones are going to be taking away all of our privacy and all of our freedom. I don't think that's a real issue. But in general, the slippery slope does kill innovation and entrepreneurship.

[Peter Diamandis]

Alex, should we talk about the innermost loop?

[Alex]

Let's do it.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right, so our first story is out of Switzerland, and it's an important one. You know, Switzerland just voted to lift its ban on nuclear plants. So after Fukushima, back in 2017, they phased out nuclear completely. Now they're reversing course. And just to give you a sense, you know, nuclear has been very slow. The country that succeeded so incredibly well is France, who has 57 operating reactors. The UK has nine. Spain has seven. Switzerland has four aging reactors that supply 40% of its power. And they were all due to be shut down. They're going to be upgraded instead of being shut down. Interesting. I was on the on zoom earlier today with Ramez Nam Saleem. And Ramez is one of the most extraordinary think energy and we should have him on the pod. I mean we definitely should. He would do an extraordinary job giving us an overview of all things energy across solar, batteries and so forth. And he was saying the reason that France actually succeeded as well as they did is because they mass produced a single reactor design instead of starting from zero and where the costs escalate and get out of hand. I asked him whether he thought other European countries would follow suit and be able to implement nuclear and he was like nope, not going to happen. But it's interesting that the buzz on nuclear is beginning to soften and the need is significant. Alex, your take on this.

[Alex]

Europe's in a bit of a bind so maybe here's a really relatable story. Whenever I'm in the Swiss Alps and it's not the winter, it's very difficult to find air conditioning. And I think Switzerland and good portion of continental Europe has a real energy crisis. They have lost access to cheap Russian oil thanks to recent events. They, except for France under invested in nuclear energy. They aren't this amazing native producer of their own solar PV and they have a culture that one can sort of theorize where the culture comes from, but a culture arguably of energy scarcity. And now as global temperatures are rising and as power consumption is increasing, Europe is having to do an about face and discover sort of learn to love nuclear energy, learn to love energy in general and the risk as we've talked about previously cite to the EU 2031 scenario and other scenarios. Europe is going to need to start to radically increase the power consumption and power production per capita. And nuclear is a. Fission in particular is a very attractive way to do that. Otherwise Europe will smolder in under heat domes, including the one that right now over the past week or two Europeans have been suffering under. I forget the exact statistic but thousands of Europeans are dying due to heat overexposure every year. It's a startling statistic and it's unnecessary with better air conditioning and higher energy per capita. So I think this is the obvious trend of the future for Europe.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Salim Ismail]

I mean the good news is AI is turning energy from the air demand. It's going to turn energy from an environmental issue into a capacity issue into

[Peter Diamandis]

a commercial profit driven issue.

[Salim Ismail]

Yes, well that, but, but at least into a national capacity issue. Like every country has to deliver enough energy and it's going to get it from, from fission in the. In the short to medium term until fusion or whatever come along to cover the baseload.

[Peter Diamandis]

So let's talk about, let's talk about fusion in our next story. You know interestingly enough, you know the joke about fusion has always been it's 50 years away in holding. Well it's now here. There are some 50 privately funded fusion companies that have raised about 6 billion. Two U.S. companies lead the pack. It's Helion, which we're going to talk about and Commonwealth Fusion. I had Bob Mumgaard, the CEO of Commonwealth Fusion on stage with me at the Abundance Summit. They're expected, they're building a tokamak like design. They're expected to build their first 400 megawatt plant back in mid-2030s circa 2032. But the second story here is Helion. It's a Sam Altman backed company. He was the largest early Investor back in March 2012 and until just two months ago he was the executive chairman of the company. Apparently he stepped down now. So Helion can actually do some large scale partnerships with OpenAI. And on June 16th the news here is that Helion cleared the required Washington state regulatory approvals for its Orion fusion power plant which is intended to supply Microsoft with 50 megawatts of power starting in 2028. So in success this is the first fusion plant coming online. It's relatively small. 50 megawatts is, you know we talk about gigawatt level plants, this is 50 megawatts. They've raised about a billion dollars at a $5.4 billion valuation. But it looks like fusion is finally here. I've got a video showing how Helion works. Because it's a unique design, I think it's worth discussing but Alex, do you want to comment before I show the video?

[Alex]

Yeah, maybe just comment. So fusion or the lack thereof has long in futurist circles been the whipping boy of why long promised technologies never happen. But actually if you look at one of the figures of merit for fusion, the so called triple product which is a product of the density of the plasma, the confinement time of the plasma and the temperature of the plasma, there has been steady progress for the past half century toward self sustaining and net positive in terms of power production fusion reactions over the past 50 years this has been sort of not just it, it's not the case that there was suddenly some recent unlock although arguably economically there has been in the form of high tc, high superconducting transition temperature ribbon. That's very helpful for certain architectures of fusion reactors. There has been continuous progress this Entire time. So I think there's an interesting parallel that one can draw between fusion, which is arguably achieved by compressing enough matter into one volume that you achieve net power output, and AI slash asi, which is arguably achieved by taking enough human knowledge and compressing it into a small enough information theoretic footprint until you achieve really a phase transition that produces prompt engineering and large language model behavior. All of that strong parallels. I think they were both inevitable, but they're both inevitable, as I'll make a stronger analogy, which is if you were watching the right metric or the right figure of merit over the long term, you could see both of these from 50 years away. You could see, or maybe 30 years,

[Peter Diamandis]

slow linear growth over time.

[Alex]

You just watch the compression over time, arguably with large language models and AI. If you were, say, watching the Hutter Prize, if you're Marcus Hutter and It's the late 90s and you're watching the ability to compress the English Wikipedia over time, you could see LLMs and AGI happening from decades away. Similarly with Helion and all of its competitors, and you're watching the triple product, you could predict when this is going to happen and it's imminent.

[Salim Ismail]

Yeah, I think the. I think there's something incredible here because this is such a foundational technology for abundance.

[Peter Diamandis]

This is the emissions thesis at large, for sure.

[Salim Ismail]

It's the foundational technology for this because once you have clean and cheap and dense energy, cost of computation, desalination, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, I mean, everything becomes the cost of just the materials at that point. So this is such a big deal, and it's hard to get. One of the hardest conversations I have with CEOs and with companies and especially with public sector is the fact that energy is becoming abundant over the next few years. And when energy becomes abundant, all sorts of other dominoes fall.

[Peter Diamandis]

Energy is the number one correlate to gdp, to health, to education. The more energy a nation has, the better it is across the board. And this is something that Europe needs to learn. Interestingly enough, the challenge here is the fission plants, the small modular reactors and the Gen 3 plants are still not going to come online, really till the early to mid-2030s. And the fusion plants, you know, getting up to 400 megawatt plants like Commonwealth Fusion or getting Helion up to that level again, those are not going to be coming online until the early to mid-2030s. And so the question is, where do we get the energy from now? I had that conversation with Ramez and he says it's from the grid, that it's going to be from the grid and that we just need to make use better use of the grid. And he's got a company, Alex and Dave called Agentic that basically is sucking down energy to batteries in the middle of the night, you know, between 1am and 6am and then pumping that energy out during peak storage. So there's plenty of energy on the grid if you could time shift it. So I think that was fascinating.

[Salim Ismail]

Yeah.

[Alex]

I think one of the questions that I don't hear enough people discussing is what is the killer app of fusion going to be? It seems obvious we're going to get it. Barring some surprise not anticipated. But will fusion arrive in time to be transformative for terrestrial data centers? Maybe, maybe not. Will it be helpful?

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Alex]

Will it be helpful for orbital data centers? Maybe. But there's also a lot of solar in.

[Peter Diamandis]

There's a 93 million mile away fusion plant that works really well in space.

[Salim Ismail]

That's right.

[Dave Blunden]

One killer. Sorry, go ahead, Alex. So.

[Alex]

So the punchline I was going to gesture at is I think actually space propulsion is one of the killer apps. If we get compact fusion reactors then like that's a wonderful application.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes. My, my nine year old science fiction self loves that. Yeah, Dave.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah. Hand in hand with that. If any material scientists or chemical engineers want to work on if we have fusion, then any storage mechanism, even if it's inefficient, as long as it's clean, is suddenly viable. So if you have cheap, cheap, cheap, virtually free fusion energy and you can put it into a car in a cheaper way than a lithium battery, right now you have to have some degree of efficiency. You don't want to throw away electricity, but post fusion you won't care about the efficiency of the reversible reaction. So anything is good. And that's true for launching rockets too. You know, once, once you've got fusion energy, you can create any reversible reaction very efficiently. Then you can port it out to your space station or to your moon base, have it do whatever it's going to do, come back and recharge it. You don't care if it's only 10% efficient.

[Peter Diamandis]

If you remember Bob Mumgaard again the CEO of Commonwealth Fusion when he was on stage, his goal there, once he gets his. His unit working, is to. Is to pump them out to create the machine that builds the machines. The same thing here for Helion. I've got a short video that explains how Helion works. And given the fact that it may be the first fusion plant coming online. And it's unique in how it works, using magnetically propelled plasma and then magnets to pull electricity out of the plasma. Let's take a listen to this. I think it's valuable for our listeners to hear about Helion.

[Dr. Dawn Musailam]

Helion's pulsed fusion device directly recovers energy, which is used to generate zero carbon electricity from fusion. It starts with Helion's fusion fuel, deuterium and helium 3. These fuels are injected as a gas into Helion's formation chamber, where they are superheated into an ionized gas called a plasma. The machine's capacitors are charged and send electricity to magnets that wrap around Helion's device. The magnets invert the plasma's magnetic field on itself into a toroidal, or donut. The device's magnets fire sequentially, accelerating the plasmas toward each other at a velocity greater than 1 million miles per hour. They collide in the fusion chamber and merge to become one hot, dense plasma in the center of the device. The machine's magnetic field is rapidly increased, compressing the plasma with a powerful force over 10 Tesla. Both these fusion reactions within the plasma convert matter into new energy, which strengthens the plasma's magnetic field. As the plasma's magnetic field gets stronger, it pushes back on the magnetic field of the machine, causing a change in the machine's magnetic flux. In accordance with Faraday's law, this change in flux induces current in the machine's coils, which is directly recaptured as electricity and returned to the capacitors that originally charged the magnets around the machine.

[Peter Diamandis]

You know, we really are living in the future. When I see that, it's, like, extraordinary. And their goal was to mass manufacture those Helion plants.

[Dave Blunden]

Well, if I have to design, cool, too. Is that Helion raised a billion. Also, Commonwealth Fusion. Remember we had dinner with him in Riyadh, March, and he had just raised a billion. So, you know, when we were at mit, the budgets for this were in the tens of millions.

[Peter Diamandis]

Research budgets.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah, yeah, research budgets. Now suddenly, you know, we've said this on the pod many times, but we're actually truly investing in the commercial sector in hard science for the first time in my lifetime. But something great will come out of those two $1 billion investments, for sure.

[Salim Ismail]

I mean, Alex, look, to bookend this. Once you make energy abundant, every other scarcity becomes a negotiable.

[Alex]

It's probably also worth, I think, pointing out what the. So what of that explainer video is so unlike many other fusion architectures. The whole point of Helion's architecture is direct recovery of energy from the fusion, the fusion plasma in a more conventional, say Tokamak style or, or other fusion reactor. There, there's a bucket brigade of energy production. You create the plasma through inertial confinement or through magnetic confinement, and then the plasma will be used to heat something, maybe water, and that produces vapor. And then the vapor goes into a turbine and you turn the turbine and that you recover electricity from the turbine, inductively inducing via magnets, currents in wires. And it's like a ten step process. The whole point, and what's potentially quite seductively attractive about the Helion architecture is you're just directly recovering from magnetic fields that are being induced by the plasma and then currents induced by those magnetic fields. You're almost directly recovering free energy from the plasma. So you're skipping a whole bunch of steps. It's potentially a lot more efficient. It's potentially a lot. I was going to say a moment ago, if I had to pick a sort of pattern, match a Mr. Fusion from Back to the Future Part 2 Architecture and identify the archetype of any one of the now many fusion startups that are out there, I think Helion is the closest to being a Mr. Fusion startup because all of those extra steps that are being skipped could lead to potentially radical compactification of the ultimate fusion implementation. So it's very exciting.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, it is. It's a beautiful, beautiful design. And again, something he can mass manufacture. And you know, where does it go? It goes into every, every township, you know, depending on the size, every city, every place that you need baseload energy production.

[Alex]

Compact fusion is going to be a thing.

[Dave Blunden]

Well, if you told me that I'd be listening to a little chipmunk voice explain Faraday's Law.

[Peter Diamandis]

It was like, am I running, am I running this at 1.5? No, that's the voice they chose. All right, let's jump into AI and a really fun story to kick us off. There's a $1.8 million incentive prize that was founded by Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub and Daniel Gross. Matt, I know Nat is your friend. Roommate.

[Dave Blunden]

Roommate.

[Alex]

It was my first roommate at mit. Fun stories.

[Peter Diamandis]

And that was on stage in March of 2023 at the Abundance Summit. And he announced the Vesuvius Challenge. And here it is being won, you know, some three years later. So the challenge was there are these scrolls that were basically buried and burnt under Mount Vesuvius back in 79 AD and the scrolls are fully carbonized. You can't open them and read them without destroying them. So they said, can we use technology, you know, can we use CT scans to gather the data and then use AI to read them? Well, for almost 2,000 years, they've been unreadable and they have just been one. So this is the first time it's done. You can see here in the image these, these, you know, scrolls of ancient Greek that have been linearized and laid out by the AI. 22 columns of ancient Greek text, and there are still hundreds of scrolls that can be read. I mean, this is using AI to basically do, you know, look back in time. Alex, this is. Must be a favorite one for you,

[Alex]

and not just because of the NAT connection. Objectively, I think computational archeology powered by AI is going to be utterly transformative in the future. I've argued from time to time before.

[Peter Diamandis]

Sure, yeah.

[Alex]

The killer app of the singularity is superpowering computational archaeology. And I'll inevitably cite to Nikolai Fyodorov, one of the fathers of the strain of philosophy called cosmism, the idea that humankind's common task is to essentially resurrect every human who's ever lived using technology. And I see in the Vesuvius challenge the very beginning of a larger arc of technological progress that may require completion of this singularity that we're in to fully run its course. But imagine, just as a thought experiment, imagine if we could do what the Vesuvius challenge did, not just for, say, performing high resolution scans of the positions of ink or the X ray analysis of small blotches of ink in order to recover scrolls that were otherwise preserved from the eruption of Vesuvius. But now imagine being able to do this at a planetary scale. Imagine that somehow, not going to say specifically what the mechanism of action would be, but imagine that we're able to scan the Earth and gain fine spatial and temporal precision, or position, momentum, canonical coordinates, if you like, for every atom on Earth. And imagine what if we feed the entire Earth state into an AI, what we might be able to recover about Earth's history. I think the answers would be quite transformative. One of my favorite anecdotes is environmental DNA, where if you go for a walk outside, you may or may not realize this, but you're just drowning in DNA that's been aerosolized from animals alive and dead. If you look, if you dig into the soil, if you dig into, say, soil near a cemetery where human bodies have been buried, DNA has a surprisingly long half life, even under environmental conditions. So there's A lot of state left over from Earth's past, not just in these scrolls that were preserved by volcanic eruptions, but in general. And I think, again, idiosyncratic position here, but I think with strong enough AI in combination with strong enough scanning technology, at some point in the future, we will be able to recreate large fractions of our past light cone.

[Peter Diamandis]

Well, you know, this is what Colossal is doing in a way, right? Going and extracting DNA from fossils, bringing back the direwolf, bringing back the woolly mammoth in a very limited slice. And this is taking that to extremes.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah, yeah, there's, there's another angle to this story too. If you, if you're watching this podcast live and you look at the image and really zoom in on it, AI is very, very good at interpolating these fragments. These little, like, if you look at the characters, no human being could ever reverse engineer what that original character was. But the AI is really good at filling in those blanks. And it's not regular LLM AI, it's not your anthropic or your OpenAI transformer. And this is where, Peter, you know David Siegel, right. The founder of two Sigma. Sure. He's on the board of mit. He has a project called Project Open Athena which he's hugely funding, which is designed to give AI compute resources to people who have alternate versions of AI that are not necessarily transformers that are very, very good at these types of problems. And so there are many, many, many of these. And as Alex was describing, if you wanted to look at fragments of DNA that are lying around and reverse engineer what happened in that room, that's a really good use case. But all of these world events, historical events, leave a little trace that's kind of scattered around. And there's usually only one interpretation of history that could have created that trace. Impossible for humans to glue together those fragments. But it's not LLM AI, it's core Neural Network AI that's built from the ground up to solve that problem.

[Peter Diamandis]

Let me do a shout out to the non technical founders out there if you've got an idea for a technology or for a company, but you're not a technologist and you want, you know, it's your dream to make it happen. Imagine being able to use an incentive prize like this to actually aggregate the best experts in the world to come help you solve your problem. Right. So in this case, you know, a $1.8 million prize probably brought, you know, on the order of tens of millions of dollars, if not more of genius to apply. And solve the problem. So think about this. This is the basic principle of xprize to get people around the world to focus on solving a problem. And we get 30x the prize money spent cumulatively to solve a challenge like this.

[Salim Ismail]

Celine I wanted to stress the prize model in the incredible powerful. What really strikes me this is the before and after. The image of before and getting actual data and information out of just so mind boggling.

[Peter Diamandis]

But the audacity that you think you can do that and I think this is the abundance thesis again that challenges we never thought were solvable fall as a result of the technologies that we're building.

[Alex]

Voice agents are just software, but software deserves a real development platform. I'm Nick Leonard, CEO and co founder of voicerun. Voicerun is your runtime and development platform for voice agents. On voicerun, agents are built and configured in code, no limiting, no code platforms. For developers that means total control and for enterprises that means extensibility that meets your complexity. We've built voicerun CLI first, meaning we've kept your Claude code, codecs and even your openclaw in mind when we built it. Your assistant of choice can build and deploy voice agents, can test and simulate scenarios, and can analyze and evaluate at scale. In other words, we've closed the loop on voice agent development. We don't build demos destined to fail in production. Voicerun is where the best voice agents happen. Visit [e-mail].

[Peter Diamandis]

All right, let's move to the SpaceX universe. Grok 4.5 is coming out based on a 1.5 trillion parameter V9 foundation model. Interestingly enough, Elon has made the claim that he's going to iterate a new model and release it every month for the rest of the year. Alex, let's go to you on this one.

[Alex]

And he said something I think even spicier if I understood his announcement correctly, that he was going to start pre training every month. Not just distillation cycles, or not just post training or fine tuning cycles per month, but start a new pre training run every single month, completely a completely new model. From scratch.

[Peter Diamandis]

From scratch, from scratch.

[Alex]

Which means pre training, which is. I mean it's audacious. It's brute force. It's exactly, I think, what the world expects of Elon. A brute force attack. I've had a number of folks since we first discussed in an earlier episode my comments about Grok being put on life support in favor of, yeah, SpaceX's hyperscaler resources being handed over.

[Peter Diamandis]

You got a lot of hate mail on that one.

[Alex]

I Got some spicy comments. I had people saying, okay, well Elon's announcing this, Elon's announcing that. Are you retracting your comments about Grok being put on life support? And I think again my comments may have been misconstrued. I want the Frontier to be competitive. Right now we are in a, arguably a duopoly between OpenAI and Anthropic. They're just running away with the race with Chinese open weight models a few months on their heels. And I want there to be a competitive frontier and I think Grok is one of the possible competitors along with Gemini and maybe Meta will come up with something eventually. I want it to be competitive. And Elon's strategy historically vis a vis XAI has been brute force. And I think hopefully as SpaceX brings more and more compute online, this sort of brute force approach where he has eventually more compute than everyone else in combination with off the shelf algorithms, maybe this will work. I see the beginnings with Grok 4.5 in combination with cursor. Right now the cursor acquisition is taking the form of post training of models that he already had. In the near future, Elon's promised that Cursor is going to be part of the pre training recipe. If he can make that work, I think Grok has a fighting chance to join the Frontier through brute force compute efforts.

[Peter Diamandis]

There's a few of the things he's doing. First of all, he's got, you know, tens of billions of dollars of dry powder now to focus on this. The second thing is, and he's announced he's bringing in his smartest players from Space X and from Tesla to work on X. He is by no means giving up the ghost here. He wants to be number one. He wants to beat OpenAI. He wants to create, you know, Grok as the ultimate greatest seeker of truth. And I again, I would never bet against him.

[Alex]

Yeah, I think the best bet here is he will brute force his way back to the Frontier. That's what I'm hoping will happen.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, well, he also doesn't.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah, what you're describing is a two horse race. He doesn't perceive that at all. He thinks it's still a race against Google specifically because the, the training directly toward a customized chip is a 10-100x unlock. And he doesn't perceive Anthropic to be near there. And then OpenAI has some activity there, but it's nowhere near. But, but Google has already gotten, you know, their whole vertical monopoly stuck together and so he, he doesn't think he's going to lose because he thinks that he's going to actually be the first to have a reasonably good model that then is custom silicon that supports the model instantaneously with the design of the chip being AI.

[Peter Diamandis]

You know, we're seeing verticalization, verticalization win every race here. We'll see it in the space industry. We're seeing with Google, seeing with Xai. I mean it's, it's fascinating. Celine, please.

[Salim Ismail]

Yeah, there's a thought, there's a. There's an idea here that could allow him to leapfrog even faster, which is remove moving from models that were built on human artifacts towards models being trained on the actual process of human machine work, which is where the cursor data becomes really useful because that creates a flywheel. We have a better model, more usage, richer workflow and then a better model.

[Philip Johnson]

Right.

[Salim Ismail]

And I think that's going to be served very well in the future.

[Alex]

I'll comment on that point narrowly. I think it's an interesting debate. One could have so the cursor acquisition, I think I viewed this at the time, commented on this on the pod previously I viewed as a brain transplant for the future trajectory of grok. Given that ChatGPT also is going through the same brain transplant of making codecs essentially a model that or a class of models together with scaffolding that were optimized for code generation and recursive self improvement that's becoming the new mainline chatgpt by analogy. XAI and SpaceX acquiring cursor post IPO to make cursor essentially the new mainline Grok I view as an analogous move. However, the data set from Cursor, which consists in part my understanding is lots of reasoning traces driven from developers who wanted more cogen. I think that buys Elon, sort of a leap to the near frontier in terms of code generation. But it will still be incumbent on Elon, XAI slash SpaceX to achieve their own recursive self improvement loop. You can only get so far by post training on developer or user traces. At some point the models need to start developing better models and that's been historically, I think, a strength of anthropic, probably a weakness of xai, but maybe he can brute force himself to the front of the recursive self improvement loop.

[Peter Diamandis]

Let's jump into a few anthropic stories. Anthropic's flagship model, Fable 5 has been offline for 15 days because the US government pulled it for national security fears. And hopefully we've talked this ad nauseum now Axios reports it may be back within days. Secretary Lutnick accredited, you know, accredited Anthropic for working on the risks through the Pentagon and nsa. They still haven't signed off on that. Interestingly enough, Stripe recently reported that they ran a test using Fable 5 to overhaul 50 million lines of code base in a single day. Work that would have taken engineers many months. The government's treating Fable 5 as a commercial AI model like a controlled munition, taking it offline and repermitting it by users. And we're going to have to see how this evolves in the coming days. So let's talk about this Fable 5 coming on. And Anthropic is another story, Alex, if you want to cover that one too.

[Alex]

Sure. So I think there are a couple of interesting notes coming out of this. If Fable 5, as I do expect, will eventually become re available. One of the more interesting takes I think is this will have been a period of a few weeks when allegedly Chinese organizations that were leveraging access to Anthropic's frontier models or near frontier models for reasoning trace distillation, will have been denied that access. So we talk on the pod all the time about how the US maybe has a three month lead or a six month lead or an eight month lead, depending on how you count. There's a certain sense in which this one month ish shutdown, future perfect tense may have or will have denied China at least a month of catch up time. That's a generous interpretation. A less generous interpretation is that this will mark what we'll look back through time. Historians will look back and say this period in time marked the period towards the the middle or the end game of recursive self improvement. When months counted and the permitting of frontier intelligence became almost a zones of thought to borrow from Werner Vinge or a block system to borrow from the Cold war when either before anyone could access frontier intelligence versus after when. Now you have to be a US person and there is strict export control for capabilities and there's a non proliferation regime where you have to gain access. If you're a non US person, you gain access access to models that are maybe a few months behind the frontier. But I also think a few years from now when we look back on this time, I think this will have been yes, there was a phase change in terms of the diffusion of frontier models. But I do think sometime in the next few years we're going to get to the end of the recursive self improvement rainbow. And there's going to be a perfect model. And we'll look back and say this was just a period of months, a delay, but ultimately, everyone is ultimately going to figure out what the perfect model looks like.

[Peter Diamandis]

Was this period of a month also a chance for a lot of critical systems to safe themselves against Fable 5?

[Alex]

The most essential ones? Maybe. And yes, there was the standup Both within the U.S. government of vulnerability scanning and outside the U.S. government, we saw three or four independent, nonprofit or for profit organizations stand themselves up to do bulk vulnerability scaling using Fable 5. But I, I think to the extent Pause ism has, has its day in the sun, I don't think this actually decelerated any AI at all. I, I think this is a net accelerant because even though public, sort of

[Peter Diamandis]

private, I'm not thinking about decelerating AI. I'm thinking about decelerating black, you know, black hats from being able to get in there and, and penetration.

[Alex]

I don't think so. I, I think black hat capabilities are proportional to capabilities overall. And I think what we saw, Chinese models like GLM 5.2 gain ascendancy for anyone who wants near frontier capabilities to do essentially whatever they want with them. It may not be as capable as Fable 5, but this creates enormous pressure on Chinese organizations and the Chinese frontier labs to catch up. And so I think as with the original Pause AI movement, it had the net effect of accelerating capabilities globally. Same idea here.

[Peter Diamandis]

Quick, two implications from this slowdown I just want to point out. One for investors, regulatory risk is now one of the first order variables for your looking at companies because it's real. And the second for technical founders is don't build your product or your company on a single model. You have to make sure you're able to swap out models because you have no guarantees as we're going forward. Dave, you saw that. Do you want to. Dave and Alex want to talk about the Sonnet announcement that came an hour ago.

[Alex]

Dave, you first.

[Dave Blunden]

Well, I mean, it's really obvious that AI is sold out and that when Fable 5 came out, you know, they doubled the price on us and, but you had to use it because it's just so good. So it's, it's pretty clear that Sonnet 5 now is a way to kind of fill this gap until Fable 5 is back out. But the price point is very high given the amount of computer that they have to use to deliver it. But people will still buy it because again, AI is sold out. So you see the revenues at anthropic going through the roof and it's because the demand for AI way outstrips the underlying chip supply. And so the byproduct of that is a lot of things. Only the very top of the mountain use cases are going to get access. And then after Fable 5 comes back out. I agree with what Alex was saying a minute ago. This moment in time will be remembered in history. This is the intersection of AI and the government. That's never going to go away now. But not every person on the planet and not every company on the planet is going to be able to access the models and it's supply constrained at the same time. So then there's going to be preferential routing. Sonnet 5 is a kind of mediocre capability at a high price point, but people will still need to buy it. And then Fable 5 will come out at its extremely high price point. That's my read on Sonnet Alex.

[Peter Diamandis]

Any addition?

[Alex]

I think this is a bizarre announcement. Admittedly this is a hasty analysis since Sonnet 5 was released right before we went to air here. But I've been trained, as I think the majority of sophisticated users have been trained, to expect that the Sonnet series from Anthropic would represent some distillation of the Opus series. And similarly the Haiku series represents a distillation of the Sonnet series. And that as you go down towards smaller, lower parameter count, more distilled models, you see some optimal frontier emerge in price performance space where performance at least throughput goes up, price per token goes down, and performance goes down. And maybe I'm missing something and maybe the answer will reveal itself in the next few hours. But just looking at the the cost versus performance at agentic tasks curves that Anthropic released with Sonnet 5, it's a little bit bizarre. On the one hand, Sonnet 5 is an optimal frontier, sort of a Pareto improvement over the last version of Sonnet Sonnet 4.6. But Opus 4.8, which has been out for what in these singularity times passes for an eternity, is better. It's superior on a cost performance basis. So I'm not 100% certain I understand what Anthropic is hoping to achieve with Summit 5.

[Dave Blunden]

I can tell you, Alex, everybody's working on these frameworks where you can bounce from model to model while keeping the context intact. And all of the work that's piling up the prompt history and the intellectual property is piling up like crazy now. And so you have a choice between working in an open framework, but Claude code and Claude cowork are super compelling, you know, with all the MCP wrappers and connectors already built in. So the easy choice kind of the apple, like I'm going to pay more, but it all works. Choice is to go with an all cloud stack. And then when you're working in Opus 4.8, if you have a simpler question, you go to Sonnet or it automatically goes to Sonnet. And if it's an even simpler question, it just goes down to Haiku. So that's the easy way to go. But the more cost effective way to go would be to bounce over to a different model, but then you have to use a third party context management platform. So that's the tension. But this is kind of like anthropic becoming the apple of AI where you know you're overpaying by some insane amount.

[Alex]

I feel like my intuition is there's some branding going on behind the scenes that we're just missing. Like maybe in the sense that Fable and Mythos are the new high end models, maybe there's some sense in which Sonnet is the new low end, like Sonnet is the new Haiku. And just viewing it through the branding of Sonnet is maybe incorrect. Maybe we should be thinking of it as the Haiku level. And it's just that Fable 5 isn't accessible. There's some weird Pareto optimal frontier I think that's missing. In order to explain why we've seen a reversion of this optimal frontier, we

[Peter Diamandis]

will find out and we will get to the bottom. Welcome to the health section of Moonshots, brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, AI is having an outsized impact on every aspect of our lives. How we teach our kids, how we run our companies. It also is a huge impact on health. Helping you prevent heart disease, one of the key things. I'm here with Dr. Dawn Musailam, our chief medical officer at Fountain Heart Disease has been personal for you as well, hasn't it?

[Dr. Dawn Musailam]

It really has, Peter. When my daughter was five, my husband died of sudden cardiac death. And so this is a topic that is one that I am mission driven to try to eradicate. Prevention first and early detection is absolutely critical. 50% of people die of heart attacks with no warning signs.

[Peter Diamandis]

No shortness of breath, no pain, no nothing.

[Dr. Dawn Musailam]

No silent killer.

[Peter Diamandis]

They just don't wake up in the morning.

[Dr. Dawn Musailam]

They don't wake up. And so you know, AI, this is our mission to advance science, to try to help, to one day democratize wellness. We know at Fountain Life, when we do this CT angiography with AI analytics, we are actually finding that 88% of people coming in have detectable coronary artery disease. But Peter, what's more alarming to me is 23% of those individuals had soft plaques. This is the plaque that would not traditionally be seen on CT looking at calcium scores alone. And this is the plaque that we must intervene with with the multimodal testing we're doing, including diagnostic laboratory studies partnered with Healthy Lifestyle recommendations.

[Peter Diamandis]

So listen, make sure you understand what's going on inside your body, genetically, metabolically and cardiovascularly. You can know and it's your obligation to know. So check it [e-mail] Peter to find out more and really make sure that you're the CEO of your own health. All right, back to the episode. All right mates, let's jump into data centers and space. And for that we're pleased to bring a friend on. Philip Johnson is the co founder and CEO of StarCloud, a startup building space based data center. StarCloud has raised about 200 million with its last round, over a billion dollars. Famously, Philip's company launched Star Cloud 1, the first Nvidia H100 GPU in orbit. And apparently Philip, you've trained your first LLM in space. Star Cloud launched in November of 2025 on Falcon 9. Welcome Philip. Pleasure to have you.

[Philip Johnson]

Thanks so much for having me. It's a huge honor. I've been a long time fan, so very privileged to be here.

[Peter Diamandis]

Awesome.

[Dave Blunden]

It's mutual, it's mutual.

[Peter Diamandis]

I mean a lot of stories we want to talk about in data centers and space to wrap up today's episode. But let's start with a little bit about StarCloud. Tell us about the company, your vision, where are you guys, what have you done with the H100 and yeah, let's go there.

[Philip Johnson]

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So we started about two and a half years ago in January 2024. We're a team of about 20 engineers based in Redmond, Washington, actually right down the road from the Starlink manufacturing facility. So about half our team came from SpaceX and the rest are from the data center companies up here. So of AWS and Azure and the others. And then yeah, so we launched our first Spacecraft, Star Cloud One in November last year, had actually five GPUs, two from Marm and three from Nvidia. But the most important one, as you mentioned, was the Nvidia H100. And so with that we were the first to train a model in space. We trained Nano GPT from Andre Carpathy, which very Tiny model, but it still counts.

[Dave Blunden]

Totally counts.

[Philip Johnson]

And then we actually were the first to run a version of Gemini in space. So we ran Gemma, which is the DeepMind's cut down version of Gemini. And then we've done a few other things. So now we're doing much more kind of useful workloads. So we've just been doing high powered inference on SAR data, synthetic Apture radar data in collaboration with various DOW entities. And also we actually just played Doom. We ran Doom on the space on

[Peter Diamandis]

Star Cloud one as one does.

[Dave Blunden]

Little latency there probably.

[Philip Johnson]

And before we get into it, I just want to say you guys have been ahead of this trend more than most. So thank you for your support. I know Alex is often being vocally about his support and Dave gave me a shout out early on. And Peter, I know you in the interview with Elon, you are also very supportive, so really appreciate it.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, well you know you're building the Dyson swarm and this is important for our great great grandchildren, for all of us.

[Alex]

Philip, just speaking for myself, I want there to be multiple Dyson swarm. We can't have a solar system scaled monopoly.

[Philip Johnson]

Agreed. Maybe a Matrioshka swarm so we can have swarms inside swarms, inside swarms.

[Alex]

So there's Jupiter and Saturn, plenty of atoms left to disassemble.

[Peter Diamandis]

So Philip, give us a sense of where you gave us a sense of where you are right now in terms of Star Cloud 1, but where do you go next?

[Philip Johnson]

Yeah, so we've got three launches booked next year and we're launching StarCloud 2 in book for January. It's about 100 times the power generation of StarCloud 1. We'll have by far the largest commercial deployable radiator in space. And so yeah, that's going to have a whole bunch of H1 hundreds also flying the black rock chip from Nvidia and also some other interesting things like some bitcoin mining, Asics and also AWS Outpost which is their on premises server blade. So we can run like an instance of EC2 on orbit which is useful for the OW customers. And then as soon as possible we'll be launching a much larger spacecraft, what we're calling Star Cloud 3. It's a 200 kilowatt 3 ton spacecraft which will fit on the Starlink. The starship has dispenser form factor. Actually I can, if you guys can see this, I can even show you we've got it welded up, a version of it welded on the, on the ceiling, the chassis, just so you Get a sense. So this is, this, this is the, the length of the chassis of it. So it's about 6 meters long. And with this we'll have huge 100 meters deployables hanging off the side of that.

[Peter Diamandis]

How much power are you generating for that to power that?

[Philip Johnson]

That's 200 kilowatts and we can.

[Dave Blunden]

Two tons.

[Philip Johnson]

You said three tons.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah, three tons. Okay.

[Philip Johnson]

Yeah. And we, we can fit about 50 of them per starship. So talking about about 10 megawatts of new compute capacity per starship launch. And yeah, we're hoping to be launching very frequently on starship and they're building just absolutely enormous capacity. As I'm sure you're all aware, these two starship gigafactories designed to produce something like three starships per day. So hopefully there'll be capacity for us to launch. And obviously we're looking at some other launch vehicles as well, but that's the primary one.

[Peter Diamandis]

So I have to ask the elephant in the room, which is when you're going in to pitch for investors, and they say, hey, but there is Elon and his mega plans and Google's far behind. Are you picking a niche in this area that you're going to be competitive in?

[Philip Johnson]

Yeah, it's a great question. So the main niche we're going after is to be more like an energy and infrastructure play than our own cloud. And so, so for example, we've got an agreement with Crusoe where we essentially say to them, hey, we have a box and that box has power calling and connectivity, and we'll work with you on whatever chip architecture you like and you can sell to whichever customers you like for whatever price you like. And you just pay us a fee. And the same way that you would pay a rental fee to somebody like Equinix, you pay that kind of rental fee to us and you finance the chips. So that's kind of the approach we're thinking, I think in the early days at least, it looks like SpaceX is primarily going to be serving their own Cursor, Groq and XAI workloads. And in the more medium term, we'll be providing a cloud service to folks like Anthropic. I think it's probably a bit further out that they're looking at being just a pure infrastructure provider, though I think actually Elon did mention something about that relatively recently. But that's the idea. I mean, so in general it's a good point because of course we're going to have a higher cost base than SpaceX. Because they own the launch. So long as we have a lower cost base than all of the other hyperscalers, I think we're in a reasonable position. You know, lots of if we have a lower cost base than OpenAI, for example, they're going to need to figure out a space solution and either they pay XAI to run workloads on,

[Peter Diamandis]

on

[Philip Johnson]

SpaceX's satellites, in OpenAI's case, I think that sounds unlikely. Or they start building their own satellites, right? Yeah. Or they start building their own satellites and it's possible, but I mean they're going to be way, way far behind. Or the last option is they'll look around in sort of two, three years as starship cadence ramps up and they're going to be like, okay, we're going to get left behind if we don't get on top of this. And they'll be like, okay, who's the most advanced in the market maybe besides SpaceX. And at that point I think we'll have a very significant lead over anybody, perhaps besides basics.

[Peter Diamandis]

Interesting. Dave. Alex, you want to jump in?

[Salim Ismail]

I've got two questions.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay.

[Dave Blunden]

Okay.

[Salim Ismail]

One was two years ago, you know, we didn't have data centers in space in our bingo cards at all. What had.

[Alex]

Some of us did, some of us did.

[Salim Ismail]

The mainstream did not. I know Alex, you've been talking about Dyson swarms since you were probably like 5 years old, but what has you jump to that and say we're going to do that?

[Philip Johnson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We actually started off by doing. Well, we were initially just looking at space based Solar. So in mid 2023 I actually just on a randomly on a weekend took a trip down to Starbase Texas like even before the first launch. So not as many people were looking at it back then. And I was just blown away by the scale of what they were building. And I, you know, in my head I was like, okay, all of the concepts from stuff from sci fi that I remember reading about Asimov was talking about space based Solar in the 40s even are going to come true. It's just a matter of a timeline now.

[Peter Diamandis]

And so Philip, if I could Space based, you know, solar power satellites for beaming energy down to the ground.

[Philip Johnson]

Yes, exactly. Yeah. So huge, huge solar panels in space and then either using infrared or microwave to beam power down the main problem. And we spent several months on the map on the math essentially on the break even, we wanted to know, okay, what is the break even launch cost at which space based solar makes sense. And we came to a number around sort of $50 a kilo where that would make sense. And initially we thought, okay, that's kind of good enough, starship will get there at some point. But then, and you know, we started working on that. But then we were like, okay, well the problem with space based solar is you lose 90 or 95% of the energy in transmission from space to ground. And we were looking around and saying, okay, once we get the power down, what are we going to be using it for? And even two years ago, most new energy projects being built, particularly in the US were being built primarily to power data centers. So the thinking was, okay, well, either directly or indirectly, that power is going to be going into data centers. And so if we instead can find a cheap way to get the data center to space, let's rerun all those calculations to know what would the break even launch costs need to be. That, that business would break even, you know, would make sense versus terrestrial. So we rerun those numbers. We came to a launch cost break even around $500 a kilo if we had a cheap way to get the data center space. And then that became the basis of a white paper that we put out in summer 2024. And then that essentially became the basis of the company.

[Peter Diamandis]

Wow, that's great. That's a great story. I mean, and it's an interesting entrepreneurial story for all the entrepreneurs listening, right? It's like you're going down one road and then all of a sudden you see a massive opportunity, especially when you go deep enough to look at it. Because the idea of space solar power satellites has been around since the God, since the seventies. Gerard K. O' Neill at Space Studies Institute, you know, looked at, his solution was to build them on the moon and then fly them to Earth orbit where the launch costs obviously are, are de minimis.

[Philip Johnson]

I'm sure that will happen. I'm sure that will happen.

[Salim Ismail]

Second questions. What are the couple of biggest bottlenecks you're facing right now?

[Philip Johnson]

We are actually very constrained on launch right now, as everybody is. We're so constrained that we're trying to book now on Relativity Space's first launch in January. I'm really excited about that. I think that would be super cool to have a launch on that.

[Peter Diamandis]

And for those we've covered Relativity Space in a podcast ago. This is Eric Schmidt's company where he's CEO. He bought it from Tim and Jordan when it missed a financing. And Relativity Space is about the size

[Salim Ismail]

of,

[Peter Diamandis]

about the size of New Glenn, half the size of Starship.

[Dave Blunden]

But if you're building toward the PEZ dispenser, actually, that's a problem that's really interesting. How's that going to work out?

[Philip Johnson]

Yeah, it is a problem. I think we're going to have to have two form factors. I mean, the primary one we're working on right now is proposed, but I think we're going to need a form factor that will fit on. Also, stoke space is the only one which has a reasonable upstage or the only one that right now is seriously working on reusable upstage. So we're also looking at a stoked launch vehicle form factor. But to be frank, the relativity one is maybe just to take a step back. The business has two phases. The first phase is while launch cost is relatively high, we're launching on Falcon 9 and others. We're primarily serving edge and cloud, you know, providing edge and cloud services for other spacecraft, particularly DOW and Earth Observation constellations. And then on a sort of three to four year time frame, as starship ramps up cadence and production, that's when we switch over to competing with all terrestrial data centers on energy cost. But in the. Yeah, so all of these, when I say we're launch constrained right now, I'm even talking about for the first business. We've got three launches booked for next year. But if you want to book anything for 2028 on Falcon 9, there's just nothing available.

[Peter Diamandis]

Wow.

[Philip Johnson]

The government's just plonked down 20 launches, which has bumped everything back. And so, yeah, unless you can get some priority, and we're going through various channels to try and get some priority on that.

[Peter Diamandis]

So this is GPU. GPUs for use of processing in space.

[Philip Johnson]

Yes, correct. So we, we will receive, for instance, RAW imagery, hyperspectral or SAR or other types of satellite sensing data. We will, instead of having to wait for a ground station and downlink enormous amounts of data, we can process all of that on the edge. And actually, this is one of the demonstrations we've just done is process a whole bunch of SAR data, identify the coordinates of a tank, and then just downlink the coordinates of that tank. And rather than having to, you know, it could take three days to get enough ground station passes to get 100 gigabytes of SAR data off satellite. Rather than doing that, we can get all of that, receive all that data optically in space, process it on orbit, and then just downlink the insight. That's, that's the use case we're building towards right now.

[Alex]

I'm curious, Philip. So the premise There is presumably bandwidth is scarcer maybe than launch. So you have to do a lot of edge inference in LEO or wherever you're doing this. I'd love to ask you sort of a similar question that I asked Will Marshall of Planet in a previous pod episode. Let's project out 10 to 20 years, well past the current bottleneck in heavy lift or heavy launch capability. What do you think as the founder and CEO of one of the incumbent Dyson Swarms, plural, what do you think the Dyson Swarm or Dyson Swarms of call it 20 years from now look like? Does it look like Leo? Does it look like sun synchronous orbit? Does it look like the moon? Does it look like Dyson swarm around the sun? Paint a picture for us. What 20 years from now the Dyson warmer swarms look like?

[Philip Johnson]

That's a, that's a good, good question. I hope within 20 years we've started putting significant amounts of compute in a sun or probably starting with the Lagrange points, although you probably don't want to clog them up too much. But even just a, just a distinct sun orbit that, you know, trails Earth or is in front of Earth, because certainly you could fit about 10 terawatts of compute in the dawn dust sound synchronous orbit and then you're back to flying in orbits which have an eclipse, you know, sort of night 45 minutes of every 90 minute eclipse. That then drives the cost up significantly because you need batteries and all these other things.

[Peter Diamandis]

Scarcity of real estate.

[Salim Ismail]

Yeah.

[Alex]

SSO is going to get crowded. That, that's, you're, you're one of the few people, Philip, I hear talking this is like overpopulation on Mars. Talking about SSO getting crowded due to the SSO Dyson swarm and then overflowing back to other orbits. That's fascinating.

[Philip Johnson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, because there's only one SSO orbit that is, you know, it's very rare and beautiful orbit, the dawn dust and synchronous orbit which flies over the terminator line. I mean, 10 terawatts is a lot of compute. That's like 20 times the entire US power grid. And probably in 20 years, my expectation roughly is that in 10 years we might hit a point where most new compute capacity is being deployed in space. If you ask me, what is the total percentage of compute in space at that point, it's still probably less than 5%. In the same way, you know, right now, most, in certain parts of the world at least, you know, Norway or whatever, most new Cars coming from production line are electric. But if you want to know what is the percentage of the fleet which is electric, it's like 4% still. And it just takes a long time to replace all of the capacity that we're building on Earth terrestrially right now. So in 10 years I would say most new compute capacity will be on space. In 20 years it could be a. I would be surprised if more than half of all compute is in space in 20 years even. But beyond that, certainly there'll come a point and it's probably more like a 50 year time frame where 99% of all computers was in space.

[Alex]

I also just have to ask second elephant in an increasingly crowded room, if Lyft over the next few years, if heavy launch is the main bottleneck, have, have you, is there some plan in a back room somewhere for you either to build or buy your own vertically integrated heavy launch provider? If that's the main constraint,

[Philip Johnson]

we are in quite serious discussions to partner with various launch providers. Probably shouldn't go too much down that. Yeah, it's early days and you know, if SpaceX can provide the capacity, we'll be very happy customers of SpaceX. You know, if not, then we'll need to figure out something. If you ask me do I think SpaceX has a monopoly and launch in 5 years, the answer is yes. In 10 years the answer is no. You know,

[Peter Diamandis]

and we'll talk about Rocket Lab's purchase of Iranium in a moment. And in fact what I'd love to do is jump into a few stories, Philip, and have you comment alongside the mates here. Yeah, yeah. The first story is recent conversation by Elon about basically Earth to or space to Earth telephony. So let's, let's jump into, into that. So I'm going to play a short video. This is a video clip of Elon speaking with the at the all in summit and then let's talk about it after.

[Philip Johnson]

So the phones that are able to use the spectrum that was acquired probably start shipping in around two years and, and then we also need to pull the satellites that are going to communicate on those frequencies. So in parallel we're building the satellites and working with the handset makers to

[Dave Blunden]

add these frequencies to the phones and then the satellites and the phones will then handshake very well to high bandwidth connectivity. But the net effect is that you

[Philip Johnson]

should be able to watch videos anywhere on your phone.

[Peter Diamandis]

So fascinating story. Vertical integration again, the whole stack. SpaceX owns its launch satellite spectrum and increasingly computer. So direct to phone, you know, Is a interesting product. It's going to be space based Internet to everybody on the planet. Thoughts on this? It's going to, you know, we're going to see the, you know, for investors. We're going to see the telecom industry getting disrupted.

[Philip Johnson]

Yeah, yeah. And he didn't mention it here. Yeah, to a point on vertical integration. He didn't mention it here. And I think he's talking about working with phone providers. It would not surprise me at all if they either buy or start manufacturing their own phones as well. I don't know what was your read of that? My read was he was talking about working with phone providers and not talking about building their own phone. But at some point I would be surprised if they don't think about building their own phone.

[Peter Diamandis]

Well, you know, it's been, it's been rumored, the Tesla phone's been rumored for a long time and Elon, Elon famously does not work well with others. He tends to buy them or blow past them. So.

[Philip Johnson]

And did you see recently the possible acquisition of T Mobile?

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, the rumors are out there. And also with Charter Communications, I mean

[Philip Johnson]

Starlink is the most unbelievable business. Starlink is going to produce hundreds of billions of dollars of free cash flow in the next sort of five to 10 years. You know, they're going to have direct sale, they're going to have unbelievable bandwidth on almost, you know, unless you're really in the middle of Manhattan, I think Starling will be the best option for most people. Yeah, I can't see a world where on Starlink revenues alone Space X isn't the most valuable company in the world. Sort of.

[Peter Diamandis]

We've been projecting 10 trillion by 2030 in terms of valuation and scaling towards 100 trillion. I'd absolutely back up Dave, what's your thoughts on this?

[Dave Blunden]

Well, my question actually is if we have direct satellite phone connectivity, downloading videos and they're, you know, that implies tens or even hundreds of thousands of satellites in low earth orbit and then data centers are going to want that same space. So is that actually going to survive the escalating needs of AI? You know, because if you figure, you know, as you said, you know, five to 10 years from now almost all compute is going into space. That's, that's also a lot of very high value use case for that same leo.

[Philip Johnson]

So yeah, you know, they're a slightly different orbit because the, the Starlink satellites, they fly around 400, 460km I think it is now. But they are in a, I think it's a 50 degree inclination so they, they're not going over the poles. They're mainly going up to just, you know, midway through Canada. And they're flying as low as they can, actually, with the AI satellites. You want to fly them as high as you can almost. Because even in this dawn, dusk, sun synchronous orbit, if you're flying at 600km altitude, you still have. There's like a month of the year when you have a 10% window which is blacked out. The ideal altitude to fly is actually 1200 kilometers. That's the lowest you can fly where you don't have any blackout out throughout the year. So I think all of the. Yeah, there's very. Between 400 and 500 kilometers is going to get extremely crowded. I think where the AI satellites fly will, will get very crowded, but it'll be for a different use case. I don't think they're going to be competing for the same real estate essentially, because are you going to run into

[Dave Blunden]

Kessler, Kessler effect problems if you go that high? I mean, at scale, we're talking.

[Philip Johnson]

The main reason people don't want to fly that high right now is actually radiation from the Van Allen Radiation belt. Do you mean because there's less drag if you have any collision there, the debris is going to stay up for longer? Yeah.

[Dave Blunden]

For millions of years. Yeah.

[Philip Johnson]

Yeah. Well, even, even at a thousand kilometers, you're probably. Most stuff is going to deorbit within about 50 years. So. So which is not great. I mean, but it's not. For example, I don't know if you know about. In 1970, the US government dispersed 400 million needles at about 3,000km altitude because they wanted to bounce radio frequency off them, which is insane. So to think about that today, it

[Alex]

was like an artificial ionosphere.

[Philip Johnson]

Yeah, it was the most insane thing ever.

[Peter Diamandis]

But it responds today.

[Philip Johnson]

Yeah, yeah. You can't imagine it being that today. But actually every single one of those needles is now deorbited, which people don't realize because people think that if you, you know, if you have quite a large satellite, it will stay up in 3,000km for quite a long time. But things which are much smaller and don't have their own propulsion because of the way the sun and moon and all of the solar wind interact together, every so often they get closer to the Earth and they get dragged in and dragged in and dragged in. The cancer effect is something we really need to pay attention to, but it's not as drastic as I think a lot of people.

[Dave Blunden]

Sometimes that's good News.

[Peter Diamandis]

Salim, you have a question?

[Dave Blunden]

Wait, what about cooling? I mean, cooling and radiation. Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Salim.

[Salim Ismail]

No, no, I was going to ask that exact question.

[Dave Blunden]

Oh, were you? Yeah, we were talking about this. I forget. Philip, we were talking either in Riyadh or at a 360, I forget where, but. But you had this all aluminum cooling and I was like, wow, that'll be incredible if that works. But now it sounds like you're going to move to liquid cooling or some kind of a liquid cycling process.

[Philip Johnson]

Yeah, yeah, well, it's liquid through aluminum, so. Yeah, that design is the same as. Yeah, it was in Riyadh. I think that we spoke. Exactly. So it's a very large, low cost and low mass deployable radiator. So radiators we know work because the International Space Station has been doing it for 20 years. The problem with the ISS radiator is it is both expensive and heavy. And so the core, it's a government project.

[Peter Diamandis]

What else do you expect?

[Philip Johnson]

Expensive, heavy and light. So the core IP of our company is making this radiator cheap and light. It's not a new physics problem. It's a manufacturing, an engineering problem. And so our radiator design, and we've got it working is. It's fabricated and gone through TVAC and everything is. Our radiator design is 10 times less mass per watt of dissipation than the ISS radiator and about 100 times less cost. Yeah, about 100 times less cost per watt of dissipation than the ISS radiator. So I'm excited that will, that will fly in January and it will be a big milestone, by far the largest commercial.

[Salim Ismail]

I wanted to double click. I wanted to double click on something you said. Did you say over time, 90, 95% of the compute we use will be done in space?

[Philip Johnson]

99.9%, I think, over time.

[Salim Ismail]

Wow.

[Philip Johnson]

But that's. That, that's. That's on Alex's Dyson Swarm.

[Alex]

That's right.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay, so Master Son, so Philip Masa son just came out with a statement saying he disagrees with the thesis of orbital compute because energy is only 7% of the cost compared to everything else. Where do you come out on that? What's your answer to him?

[Philip Johnson]

I did a post about this this morning because people kept tweeting at me. So I was like, okay, well he also sold all of his Nvidia stock in 2019. So he's not always right. No, I mean he is right that energy is a very small proportion. Energy and infrastructure Though is actually quite.

[Dr. Dawn Musailam]

Well,

[Philip Johnson]

yeah, I mean it depends on right now chip cost is very high and so that is by far the dominant cost. But if you use include energy and infrastructure, you're talking about at least 30% of the cost. The main problem is if you even to build a new energy project terrestrially, you're looking at like a 5 to 10 year long lead time on just the permitting of that. Yeah. And so the main problem is we can deploy this stuff extremely rapidly. So even if we were break even on energy and infrastructure, it would still make sense to do this. But we're looking at doing this about 10 times cheaper on both energy and infrastructure. When I say infrastructure, what I mean is we don't need batteries, cooling towers, big chillers, backup power. All we need is a dirt cheap radiator. Our radiator is really dirt cheap. And then a lot of the other infrastructure costs are gone. It's only then the launch cost is the additional piece we have. But that, as I say, is very rapidly trending towards much lower launch cost.

[Alex]

Philip, if I might. Yes, please just pull the thread a little bit on launch. So projecting conservatively 20 to 30 years out, where do you think launch is going to come from? Will we be using railguns to launch from the lunar surface? Will we have optimistically self replicating Von Neumann probes that are disassembling our solar system to build more compute? Where is all the matter and energy and launch coming from 20 to 30 plus years out in your mind?

[Philip Johnson]

I am Elon has this great quote, something like Optimus is the Von Neumann probe. And I kind of agree with him. Like if you can get 100,000 optimized to the surface, to the lunar surface, and get them to build an Optimus factory on the lunar surface, you know, then we're off to the races. Like then you have this insane exponential curve in terms of development and pace of development.

[Peter Diamandis]

Hyper exponential.

[Philip Johnson]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Hyper exponential. Yeah. So I do think we'll have mass drivers on the moon and I think they'll probably come sooner than most people. Well, if it was 20 years, I think that would. That if it was less than 20 years, that would be maybe surprising to me. If it was more than 20 years, I'd also be a bit surprised, I think. Yeah. Around the that time frame.

[Dave Blunden]

All right, I apologize. I have one of the senior execs from State street bank waiting for me outside the door here and I'm gonna love watching this podcast because all of my questions are in Alex and Saleem's heads, but I can't wait to hear your answers. I'm super excited about what you're doing now. Congratulations.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right, Dave.

[Philip Johnson]

Thanks so much, Dave. Appreciate it.

[Peter Diamandis]

See you very soon again in our next pod recording. But let's move to our last story on the docket here. Rocket Lab is acquiring Iridium, creating yet another fully integrated space powerhouse. So Rocket Lab, for those of you who don't know, is a company started by Peter Beck. Actually, sir Peter beck. It's a $64 billion company now. Kudos to them. I mean, going, you know, Peter had no background in launch and he built arguably the second tier provider for launch after, after SpaceX, they have their electron launcher. It's a smaller size launcher, but it's launched 91 times. It's got a very high reliability at this point. They're building their next vehicle called the Neutron. It's about half the size of Falcon 9 and it's planned for a first launch by the end of this year. Like Falcon 9, it's got a first stage which is reusable. And they're acquiring Iridium. I know Iridium well. I was playing in the big Leos in the early 90s when it got its license and started. It started commercial service in November of 1997. And it's a 66 satellite constellation orbiting at about 780 kilometers. A fun story. I don't know if you know this, Alex. It was originally called Iridium because IT originally had 77 satellites, which is the atomic number for Iridium. When they change it to 66 satellites, they did not change the name to Dispersium, which is atomic number 66. Good marketing move there, I don't think.

[Alex]

Also Iridium, I think is a little bit more stable as a nuclide.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. And you know, it sounds a lot better than dispersium. So what makes Iridium interesting is it's got 10.5 MHz of bandwidth at L band that's globally coordinated. So they go through the ITU and they get, you know, importantly for our viewers here, you can get 10.5 MHz in the US but can you get in every country around the world? And that's what makes it a prize. So spectrum is the prize. And vertical integration here is becoming the winning structure for the new space economy. So owning launch and manufacturing, they build, you know, at Rocket Lab, they build their own satellites as well. And getting spectrum and operations is a winning combination. So they're playing on the SpaceX handbook pretty, pretty extraordinary thoughts for you, Philip.

[Philip Johnson]

Yeah, I mean, it's a very smart move, I think. And it's particularly smart because, yeah, you. I think there's been quite a bit of commentary, people saying he's not trying to compete directly with SpaceX with this and if he was, it probably wouldn't be as smart a move. He's really carving out a niche. And the other thing is his share price has gone to an insane multiple of his revenue and he's capitalizing on that because I'm pretty sure all of this is going to be in Rocket Lab stock. And so yeah, it makes sense to start paying for cash generative profitable companies in Rocket Lab stock when you're trading at a however many hundred x revenue multiple that they're trading at.

[Alex]

I have to ask Philip a question just about the spectrum side. There are a bunch of obvious questions I could be asking about vertical integration and does Spectrum and LEO Computer want to inevitably own or be owned by heavy launch capability. But I just want to focus on spectrum, so. So to the extent part of the Iridium Rocket Lab story is the acquisition of RF spectrum, I have to ask you, do you think radio has a future or will we find ourselves five to ten years from now where it's all optical frequency, direct laser links and radio has approximately no future?

[Philip Johnson]

It's a great question. I would lean more towards the second of those two options. So do you think it really has no, no frequent future? It's useful because it's cheaper, because you don't need gimbal, you know, things. But, but laser is, is where everything's going. We've got three laser terminals on our second satellite launching in January with, you know, gimbal lasers, we've actually just signed a contract with SpaceX to for the next 25 of our satellites, we'll have two Starlink, they call it Laser Plug and Play laser terminals on our, on our satellite, and then one laser SDA compliant laser that can connect with the government satellites. So yeah, lasers, you're the future for space comms. And it's also unregulated, which makes it amazing because it's.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right, guys, I apologize. I've got a heart out here as well. Philip, a pleasure and excited to watch Star Cloud 2 and Star Cloud 3 make it to orbit. Thank you for joining us. Salim. Are you coming home? Eventually I am.

[Salim Ismail]

I'll be here for a few more days and then I'll be back.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right. And Alex, how about you? What's your travel schedule looking like?

[Alex]

Well, I don't know. I'd love to visit Leo or Sun Synchronous orbit sometime soon. Philip, we should chat.

[Peter Diamandis]

Should.

[Philip Johnson]

We should. And Peter, I think you're going to be in Paris in a. In a week, so I might see you there.

[Peter Diamandis]

I think I may be there virtually.

[Philip Johnson]

Oh, no, I see, I see.

[Peter Diamandis]

Wait, where am I? No, I'm in. I'm in Calgary calling the kettle black. Yeah, Calgary, Germany and Greece. Yes.

[Philip Johnson]

Okay. Okay.

[Salim Ismail]

All right.

[Peter Diamandis]

Love you guys again.

[Alex]

Thanks, Peter.

[Peter Diamandis]

Thank you. Thank you, Alex. Thank you.

[Dave Blunden]

Take care, guys.

[Peter Diamandis]

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